Curious

There was a whole lot on the news about Cyber Monday. Etailers were hoping for lots of customers and lots of sales.

Without giving away any of Santa's secrets did you shop online on cyber Monday? What websites did you purchase from? Did you shop for any or all of your gifts at a site that has a handmade focus like Etsy, ArtFire, Silkfair or Zibbet? For ease of shopping which do you like best?

Sorry about all the questions but I really am curious and would love to hear from more of my readers.

In 2 Weeks

It will be St. Patrick's Day in 2 weeks from today. That is in the US where it is celebrated on the 17th of March each year. It is a day for remembering all things Irish since so many Americans trace their roots back to Ireland. I am one of them myself. So I went window shopping on Silkfair to see what I could find and of course I came up with something for you to see that I think is certainly prettier than green beer and might even smell better than freshly baked soda bread.


This lovely soap is from the Desert Maiden Bathworks Shop. The seller describes the product this way-
Just in time for St. Patrick's day. Buy this bar for your favorite Irish man or lady! The orange is a Fizzling Tangerine scent. The white layer is Lemon Drops, and the green is our Twist and Shout Lime! Perfect for either scent and light enough to celebrate spring and refresh the senses!The Celtic oval represents the Irish's proud Celtic heritage!All my soaps are created using the highest quality bases and fragrance oils. Nothing created in my soap kitchen goes untested by me and my business partner, Lisa. We take pride in all of our creations. All bath and body products are made in small batches to ensure the highest quality for our customers.All soap bars are approximately 3-4oz in size. We do have multiples in stock in most cases. We welcome all wholesale orders. If your fragrance is out of stock, we will be happy to make you a bar or two, but please give us 10 days to complete custom requests.Ingredients: Saponofied Coconut Oil, Saponofied Castor Oil, Saponofied Safflower Oil, Saponofied Palm Oil, Olive Oil, Soybean Protein, Sorbitol, Sorbitan Oleate, Water, Lye, and Fragrance.

If time permits and I don't get too distracted with other things I will be bringing you more things from Silkfair and other sites that fit the St. Patrick's Day theme.

Support for Artists

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination in the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

-Yann Martel-

While I don't have any illusions about being an artist or for that matter an artisan ( call myself a crafter who does needlework) I have a presence on several sites that are filled with artists. Most of them would tell you that they are driven to create whether you buy their items or not. But my question to you is, why miss out?

Looking around our home the other night Jim and I noticed that our favorite things are those that come from someone's hands. We have a couple pieces of pottery bought on trips. I have a beautiful quilt bought in Pennsylvania. We have glass hand blown after the artist listened to our ideas on color and general shape. We have prints of watercolors from places we have been done by local artists. All of these mean so much more to us than doodads and knickknacks that were mass produced and fill our lives with maybe useful but intended to be disposable stuff.

If you are looking for handmade in any form to fill your holidays there are 4 sites I would recommend you take a look at.

• Etsy - the biggest marketplace there is. It can be overwhelming but the things available in all types of arts at all kinds of price ranges are amazing.
• Silkfair - not just handmade but a crafts section is there with the work of some folks that is worth a look.
• Shop Handmade - a fairly new site. This site has some ties to green projects like planting trees. The magnifying feature makes it easier than on some sites to examine what you are condidering for purchase.
• Art Fire - just getting started. It looks as if many artists that were on or are on Etsy are represented here. Because of the smaller size which I don't expect to continue much longer, getting to feel like you can see it all is part of the fun.

Consider handmade for the holidays and afterwords in your everyday life. It will make you feel good, kind of like having this shawl wrapped around your shoulders on a snowy night at home. Trust me on this.

My Work

A Slide Show of Some of my Work.
I was just playing around with my Windows Live Space and made a slide show. Do you think that there will ever come a day when you like all things in one place. With blogs some features I like here on blogger and I like some of the features of Live Spaces.
It is the same with my shops. Each site has something I like and something I don't. I will say right now that the places with the administration the listens to its customers the most are Art Fire and Silkfair.
But of course that is one silly old woman's opinion.

More Confidence

It is great to have sales. It lets you know that someone out there appreciates what you do. It gives you the confidence to risk a little more and put up more things for judgement and hopefully sales.

In keeping with these new found good feelings I made some changes and added some things to two of my shops, the one on Etsy and the one on Silkfair.

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New to Etsy are these two scarves. Sometimes I get my hands on a yarn I enjoy working with and like to see what variations I can come up with. I have done four scarves all together with this yarn so look for two more in the shop very soon.

The scarf on the left is narrow and the variegated yarn was combined with a solid black worsted weight.

The scarf on the right is about 8 inches wide and only uses the variegated boucle yarn that goes from a deep black to silvery gray to white and back to the black.

Both of them are very soft and light but still would add a bit of comfort to your neck and shoulders.

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Technorati Tags: etsy,scarves,knit,black scarf,boucle scarf,silkfair

New Homes for Headbands

In the last couple weeks I have had the pleasure of sending two of my headbands to new homes. One of them went to Oregon and the other is on the way to Wisconsin.

The Blue Paisley headband was sold through my Etsy shop and since I made 4 of these another one has been relisted if you think it would be right for you.

The other headband that sold was the Bold and Beautiful headband. This sale was my first ever in my Silkfair shop. I only made two of these and the last one is listed on Etsy right now.

I have really enjoyed making these headbands. I believe they are different than what you can find anywhere else. They are a great way to keep your hair out of your face and with the ties they are adjustable for anyone. The ties could also be used to tie your hair in a ponytail to keep it off your neck and feel cooler during hot summer days. I have a few more designs to photo and list. Look for them in the next week.

I have made a policy of never putting the same item on more than one site. In fact I have separate boxes to hold the inventory for each store. This is to make sure that no single item can sell on two different sites at the same time leading to an unhappy buyer especially if they want something I can't reproduce. It also helps to keep me sane. If you see the same item in all three of my shops, Etsy, Silkfair and Ecrater it is because three or more of them exist. I keep the prices the same on all sites so folks can shop with the system they are the most comfortable.

Spreading Out The Eggs

You know the saying. Don't put your eggs all in one basket. With selling online it seems to be the same way. Don't expect one venue to do all your selling for you. Well I am not getting rich but I am finding other baskets. One of the best finds for new baskets I think is Silkfair.com. This place has put a lot of little things in place to make life so much easier for small and large businesses alike. If you are small like me all listing is made easier because you do it all on one page and you can load multiple photos at one time. Categories and subcategories for your shop have just been added. If you look at the sidebar here you see that they have a widget available and you can make one for any shop you are looking at from the shop home page.

From a forum update you can see they have some exciting things in the works

If you play a bit with the category tree, you'll notice there are function to rename / re-sort, and trying to incorporate the category tree management inside 1 import file will be difficult.

Looking back, when we specified exactly 2 months ago the short term plans, we completed most plus others that came in. Additional short term major items that's planned or are currently active :

- adult content identification : we're coming to realize that there is no way we're going to be able to avoid this, so, we'll have to develop a structure / mechanism to deal with it.
- removing sandbox payment gateway settings. Too many shops having that enabled.
- tagging of unique / handmade products/shops vs mass produced products
- customization of stores. This is our main focus.
- custom category tree in listing imports/exports
- GoogleBase / Google Shopping submission - huge delays on this function, but we're back at it
- Purchase Order exports
- infrastructure upgrades
- Resolving IE problems / Firefox 3 compatibility issues
- Homepage change / personalizations
- more tuning of site for search engine

Not yet started :
- coupons/discounts
- shipping calculator
- scrapbook

Right now listing an item is free but a 3% commission is taken from sales. I think the plan is to charge for video files if you use them as well as for premium shop customization features. Did I mention you get your own blog and can set up your own forum? I am so pleased to see that being able to offer discounts and a shipping calculator are on the list. When it is on a list to get done at this place it seems to happen and not drift off into cyber never never land where they hope the users forget about it. Many of you know what site I am referring to here.

Take a look. It can't hurt. You may find yourself a new basket for your eggs. Mine is right here.